Affiliations

Services

the CMPA's unique setup offers a wide variety of services and opportunites for our customers. Along our right of way are many miles of undeveloped land waiting for a proper customer. a former military base is ripe for reuse as warehousing, and it's all handled by the kind of neighborly service not seen in many years of railroading.

Fleet StorageWithin the Jefferson Proving Grounds sits 15 miles of track, protected by barbed wire and constant guards. We serve several grain agencies, sidelining large portions of their fleets during the off seasons. Soem even from other states. During the Recession, Jefferson was a welcome place for unused Autorack cars and parts boxcars. Stored Chessie coal hoppers from the ex-Monon line were moved in, and Meese Orbitron-Dunne stores loaded resin hoppers until they need just that specific blend. And guess what, there's still plenty of room for you to join in too! Now you no longer need to stress over not having the cars you need or having no place for them, we'll hold onto them for you. Just give us a call, we'll get them moved, and take care of the necesary maintence for you through our partners SouthEastern Car Works.

Less-than-TrainloadLTL is a lesser used acronym stemming from the old Less than Carload days of the REA. what LTL means is basically "Your're company isn't big enough for a major railroad to care." Simply, Class 1 railroads are out to move trains the most efficent way possible. That means every last ounce of pulling power, as few crews, and as few engines as they can. Class 1s simply don't want to deal with small local trains. That's where we come into play. Any shortline railroad can do this; take the one or two carloads from you, throw them in with the two cars from the guy next door, three cars from the manup the street, and drop them at the mainline. All of a sudden, your tasteless two cars has turned into a recognizeable part of a train for the modest price of doing what the railroad was already doing as they came through North Vernon. Our common calls for large unit trains means they know about us too, we aren't just a slow order on their march to St. Louis or Cinncinati.

Trucking and LogisticsRailroading is logistics, and thanks to modern technologiesand a twist of irony, the best of railroading is often through trucks. in 2000, several small trucking companies came to CMPA with an idea: Cinncinati-St.Louis and beyond is a popular intermodal route for Chessie, but for a small trucking company, driving to Cincy to sit in line to drop off a trailer to sit in a lot for days on end. So they set up shop in Jefferson and built a loading ramp. We supply them a handful of flatcars, then take it to the interchange point to be added to an intermodal train already en-route. It's not one that Chessie is fond of, as intermodal is considered a hot commodity that shouldn't be stopping, but we can have a trailer out by the next day, depending on drop-off and car movement time. Interested? Please remember this is a model railroad and contact our 1:87th office to discuss capacity.

Since then, CMPA has also begun it's own trucking program. local drivers move CMPX, TTX and TBX trailers. All CMPA trailers are RoadRailer and Triple Crown equipped. what's a roadrailer? It means we can eliminate the flatcar, the coupler, the hoisting crane, and the coupler slack that is so hard on freight. Teh trailer's own air-ride suspension lifts the trailer over a railroad wheelset, then lowers it back down, BECOMING the railroad car. The downside, it's much easier to add trailers thsn to remove them. The real strenght to RoadRailer is blocks going from one terminal to the other. That being said, RoadRailers can be added to the rear of any train, allowing localized blocks such as our own to be moved to a hub to be dropped off from any satillite location. And, as RoadRailer and TripleCrown corridors become more popular, more end-hubs will be available. Our box and refirgerated roadrailers are additionally Amtrak compatible, moving north to Indianapolis and south to Lousiville on the Kentucky Cardinal and carried to potentially anywhereby any AmtrakTrain with ExpressTrak instructions. And, because these are otherwise built to standard trailer concepts, a Roadrailer can be loaded onto a piggyback car. Can you say unlimited possibilites?